Ready to slack off?

Work productivity notoriously dips during the winter holiday season but a survey to be released Tuesday suggests that employee productivity takes a nosedive for an entire month surrounding Christmas.

Whether it’s due to laziness, vacation time or other factors, productivity begins dropping during the two-week period before Christmas, according to a survey of computer usage by Arlington, Mass., Glance Networks, a maker of Web demos software. Based on past trends, productivity will begin its annual pre-Christmas drop this week, said Rich Baker, founder and CEO of the company.

"It's striking," Baker said in a phone interview. "We looked at the last three years and the trends were almost identical year to year … [Employees are] not doing as much business-oriented work."

The survey found that productivity declined steadily for two weeks leading up to Christmas, and was 35% below normal levels the day before Jesus Christ's birthday. Productivity was down nearly 90% the day after Christmas, and 50% below normal levels until New Year’s Day.

Most employees did not return to pre-holiday levels of productivity until the third Tuesday after New Year’s, the company said.

The trend may not be due to simple laziness. Clearly, employees use more vacation time during the winter holiday season. Baker said Glance Networks did not try to determine what factors cause the annual drop in productivity.

"It could just be employees taking time off. All I can say is [work-related Web] traffic is down," he said.

Glance Networks, which produces a screen sharing service that allows people to show their live PC screen to anyone connected to the Internet, performed its survey by analyzing three years worth of online traffic volume data of more than 2,600 business-to-business companies that use its service. The screen sharing tool is used for online product demonstrations, sales presentations, customer support and employee training sessions.